Neli and O'Neill

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA -- When then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill visited Buenos Aires last August, he toured a metallurgical plant, a middle school and a children's soup kitchen. To his credit, the three stops were in working-class neighborhoods hit hard by Argentina's economic crisis. But O'Neill did not set foot in one of the capital's shantytowns, or villa miserias as they are called here.

One of the harshest results of the Argentine economic meltdown has been the creation of new shantytowns and the growth of old ones: Since the country plunged into economic crisis four years ago, the number of shantytown residents in Buenos Aires has increased from 650,000 to 1 million.

If O'Neill had visited a villa miseria, he would have found plenty to confirm his conservative convictions: satellite dishes tottering atop precarious sheet-metal shacks that still lack sewer-system access, corrupt political operatives using Argentina's tattered safety net to capture votes, and "lazy" people who have given up even looking for a job -- and who are therefore not reflected in Argentina's 20 percent unemployment rate.

Yet more importantly, and perhaps most surprisingly, he would have found people who are an awful lot like him. The shantytowns are full of ideological soul mates to O'Neill: Their residents are scrappy and entrepreneurial, and many concur with the former cabinet member's pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps philosophy. Moreover, many villa miseria residents share O'Neill's mistrust of foreign governments: O'Neill was known to believe that International Monetary Fund bailouts are a waste of money, while many conservative shantytown dwellers here deeply distrust America and international institutions. And O'Neill would be no stranger to their daily discomforts: He too was born into a poor family whose house lacked water or electricity.

Here, of course, is where the similarities end. O'Neill, the beneficiary of an American capitalism that rewards ambition, worked his way to the chairmanship of Alcoa and is today worth millions of dollars. For all their resolve and resourcefulness, the residents of Argentine shantytowns still live in shantytowns.

But this one glaring difference aside, O'Neill would have likely found a lot to admire had he traveled to a Buenos Aires villa miseria. And, had he listened closely, he might have returned home to Washington with a few provocative -- and, in their own way, conservative -- ideas.

Among the people O'Neill might have talked to is 28-year old Nélida Benítez. She lives in Villa 31, a shantytown at the edge of Buenos Aires' financial district. The larger holes in the brick walls of her home, where she lives with her mother, are covered with wood scraps and hard, green plastic, but the remaining gaps are large enough to permit conversations with neighbors. The door is a damaged wooden gate falling off its hinges, but on several visits, Benítez never let me inside. "I can assure you it's not comfortable," she says, ushering me to a patio next door, where we sit under the shade of a tree, a rarity in Villa 31.

Her thoughts about other shantytown residents confirm her ideological similarities to O'Neill: "They have the belief that they're pobrecitos, the unfortunate, that they're not responsible for their actions and their lives. They say, 'This or that drives me crazy.' No! You drive yourself crazy. Everyone says that you're not responsible for your life, that you need a patrón. But it's not true," Benítez says. "We can't just always be waiting for the politicians."

Worse than politicians, she says, are the self-righteous charity groups that come to Villa 31. "We need to begin with the kiddies, so they feel self-esteem and capable of transforming their reality," she says. "The people that come to the villa to help, they don't understand the need to tell women and children here that they can survive on their own, that they don't need someone to do everything for them."

And she translates these thoughts into projects. Her résumé, were she actually to write one, would display as much leadership and initiative as any Ivy League graduate's. She founded and directs a children's dance troupe; she tutors, for pay, adults preparing to get a high-school-equivalency degree; she founded a cooperative of women laid-off when the sweatshops closed; she acts as a mother to many of the children in her neighborhood. When she opens her mouth -- and she does not close it often -- a constant flurry of possible new ventures tumbles out: an ice-cream cart, a program to teach English to shantytown residents, a new way to fix instruments for the dance troupe.

Like many shantytown dwellers across Latin America, Benítez grew up in the countryside far from any city. She was born in what she calls a pueblo perdido, a lost village, in the alluvial lowlands of Chaco Province in northern Argentina. Storms would damage her family's house and kill its livestock, but the Benítez clan endured until her father, a truck driver, discovered city life in Buenos Aires. "Here it was all a party," Benítez says. "He had the chance to do what he liked to, since he was a womanizer, a drunk, a risk taker."

Benítez's father persuaded her mother to move to Buenos Aires. "He convinced my mom that here in Buenos Aires we were going to make progress, that it would be all better, that here there was everything, that life would be much easier than in the countryside," Benítez recalls. "She came so happy. She came so content with life. We came on a train. We got here, and my mom wanted to kill him. We had four sheets of cardboard and another for a roof."

Her father left a few years later, and then came the dictatorship. Villa 31 was especially offensive to Argentina's new dictators: For one thing, its location in the Buenos Aires financial district meant it might be noticed by foreigners attending the 1978 World Cup; for another, Argentina's most famous revolutionary theologian, Father Carlos Mugica, preached there.

"One day I came home from school," Benítez says. "It was June 7, 1977. And I see my mother is at the door, very sad. And she shows me that on the door, the soldiers had painted, 'Eviction,' with a number. And she says, 'Look, we have to go.' And I was only 6, you see. The thought that we had to leave, when you have your life there, and you lose all your friends -- how could you think of leaving?" Her mother gave in to her daughter's demands, and they stayed as everyone left.

Most families in Villa 31 did move out, and the military set about persuading the remaining families to go. The dictatorship, according to Benítez, banned business in the shantytown and cut off electricity. (The water valves could not be shut because there was no running water.) "Staying was absolutely crazy, it was mortally dangerous; they could have come and killed us at any moment," she says. Over seven years, the dictatorship killed more than 30,000 Argentines.

After the dictatorship, Benítez began working in a store. For two years, the local school was closed, and she divided her time between reading books and working. When the school reopened, students from a wealthy neighborhood nearby were sent there along with students from Villa 31. "For me, meeting the kids from the other neighborhood was great. I learned a lot from them," Benítez says, calling it a turning point in her life. She realized that the wealthy children faced higher expectations than the shantytown children -- and that drove her to excel. Having the wealthy students' teachers didn't hurt, either.

Unlike most shantytown residents, Benítez graduated from high school. Last year she began to study English translation at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina's leading university, which does not charge tuition. But because of the economic crisis, which worsened a year ago after default and devaluation, she dropped out; the subway fare and photocopying costs, she explains, were unaffordable.

But Benítez, forcing reality to fit her tenacious spirit of self-reliance, sees Argentina's current economic crisis as an opportunity. "The crisis is bringing out the best in us. We're beginning to use our hidden skills and talents," she says. One of her sisters makes wood carvings; the other draws. Benítez is encouraging them to rent a flea-market stand to ply their wares.

Benítez is essentially a businesswoman: Her skill is finding uses for the skills of others. When she noticed that shantytown women had been laid off from their jobs in clothing "workshops" (read: sweatshops), she formed a cooperative so that members could work sewing blouses, sweaters and dance uniforms. There are 15 women in the cooperative, about half from Bolivia. During the 1990s economic boom, the quickest workers among them earned $500 a month working 12-hour shifts six days a week. Now, were it not for Benítez, their skills would be worthless. As part of the cooperative, they earn about $1.50 an hour.

Benítez wants to teach these women self-confidence, and to express themselves, so they meet on Monday mornings for what Benítez calls "a mental-health clinic." But she also wants to teach them to be responsible, and when a few arrived late for a Thursday afternoon business meeting, they were gently reminded that outside the shantytown, punctuality is important.

She has similar goals for her children's dance troupe, which performs the controlled-chaos murga dances and which is named after the Villa 31 liberation theologist.

"Our troupe has a way of getting things done, which is to do them ourselves. If we need money, we raise it," Benítez says, pointing out that the group has organized Bingo and raffle fundraisers. "There are a lot of things the kids can learn from this type of troupe: to be responsible, to take care of their uniform, to keep to schedules." Many shantytowns have dance troupes but Benítez's seems to be the only one that performs in the Buenos Aires city center and the plazas of wealthy neighborhoods.

Benítez's only income is from tutoring adults studying for a high-school-equivalency degree, which earns her about $10 a week. From the cooperative, she earns only as much as the other women do; the dance troupe reinvests everything it earns, to repair the drums, for example. But Benítez says she is happy devoting her energies to the cooperative and the troupe. She says that if she had been born in better circumstances, "I think I would be on the other side; I wouldn't be here. So if I'm here, it's because there's some mission, some purpose I have to achieve."

O'Neill would have liked Benítez -- for the most part. They would have disagreed on certain things, though. When Benítez's brother-in-law told me that "Yankee Jews" were behind September 11 and the AIDS disease, Benítez did not object. It's unlikely, she said, but not impossible. And after an Argentine customs official held up a donation of food and medical supplies sent to a poor Argentine province by Washington-area residents, Benítez believed the Americans were also at fault: They must have sent spoiled food to mock the Argentines, she said.

Americans, and conservatives like O'Neill in particular, should be interested in Benítez: Her views may not have geopolitical importance but she is a hard-working person -- with strikingly conservative ideas -- who nevertheless has both a negative view of the United States and little prospect of escaping Villa 31. And there are many like her whose earnest struggles to change or flee their shantytowns are made almost insurmountably difficult by the realities of life in the villa miserias.

What can the Argentine government do for Benítez? A lot, actually. First, Benítez lacks a title to her home and her land, as apparently all Villa 31 residents do. In 1996 the government uprooted a number of Villa 31 families -- providing generous if insufficient compensation -- to build a highway that today splits the shantytown in two. Benítez is afraid it could happen again, except without the compensation awarded during the 1990s boom. Her fear discourages her from making improvements to her home: She even refuses to purchase a hot-water heater, which many other Villa 31 dwellers have. Buenos Aires has a meager land-title program, and no one expects Villa 31, which sits on very valuable land, to benefit from it.

This and the other government measures that Benítez needs are the sort that O'Neill or other past and current members of the Bush administration could be encouraging as part of a "compassionate conservative" foreign policy. For instance, the University of Buenos Aires could provide funds for the retention of poor students and more need-based scholarships for transport and supplies. Both could be financed by charging low tuition, instead of no tuition, to students who could afford it. The provision of food to soup kitchens and welfare benefits could be independently regulated to prevent corruption. A less corrupt safety net would provide more help to those that most need it, and it would encourage people such as Benítez to trust civic institutions rather than resent them.

All these moves would be politically impossible -- unless the United States wanted them to happen. If O'Neill had come to Argentina to talk about land titles for the poor, in addition to fiscal responsibility, he might have been pelted with fewer eggs. Because the IMF makes its loans to Argentina contingent on strict fiscal austerity and neoliberal economic reforms, why not compel the organization to be socially meddlesome as well? Social responsibility could become part of IMF conditionality: no land title program, no loans, it could decree for example.

Exactly what social reforms should be required would vary from country to country. Since the IMF specializes in macroeconomics, World Bank officials participating in IMF missions would take the lead in determining the social policies upon which IMF aid would be contingent. To minimize paternalism, the required measures should be arrived at through genuine, public negotiation with debtor nations. Imagine IMF meetings with NGO and charity officials: "What's on your wishlist?" the IMF could ask them. And by making their wishes come true, the IMF could transform its image from that of Grinch into that of Santa Claus.

If O'Neill had visited this shantytown, he might have returned to Washington armed with some new ideas. Perhaps his successor will find time to come. If he does, he can find Nélida Benítez on Block 28 of Villa 31.